Modularity, Prefabrication + Building Manuals In postwar Italy: Scenes from America

Italian architect Bruno Zevi, forced to leave Italy during WWII, first studiedat Harvard University and was then employed as an architect in the Designand Engineering Section of the Office of the Chief Engineer in the UnitedStates Army. In July of 1944 he was reassigned to a post in England, awaitinghis return to his native city, Rome after its liberation in 1945. Zevi, withhis combined experience in the U.S. and in Britain was exposed to cuttingedge modular construction used for temporary and emergency housing, andfor hangers and other prefabricated military buildings. He was also exposedto a scientific approach to the design process through Architectural GraphicStandards (first published in the U.S. 1932) and other building manualswhich offered a modular and systematized approach to the design and productionof buildings.In contrast, Italy, which was in immediate need of housing and other structuresin the postwar Reconstruction did not have such a unified approach tobuilding. Italy’s building techniques were strictly in situ traditional methodsof construction—and predominantly on site construction. A notion of modularity,if any existed, was only in the brick, concrete block, or gypsum panelsused, but nothing that contained any sophistication in terms of prefabricationoff site or an intelligence about systems of modular construction.Upon his return to Rome after the war, Zevi brought this know-how to his positionworking for the Rome-based American Government outreach service,the United States Information Service (U.S.I.S.). He was stationed as Chiefof the Technical Bulletin Section with the Office of International Informationand Cultural Affairs in March 1946. Under this umbrella organization, Zevi,along with experts, engineers Bruno Buongiovannini and Pier Luigi Nerviand architect Mario Ridolfi, were tasked with the development, based onAmerican building standards, of the Manuale dell’Architetto (The Manual ofthe Architect) to be completed in a rapid 6 month period. This Manuale wasdistributed free of charge by the U.S.I.S to 25,000 architects, engineers,builders, and technicians to attain a systematic approach, through modularand prefabricated elements to the urgent need for housing and other civicstructures.This early work was important for the future of prefabrication and modularconstruction in Italy and spawned extensive studies and further manuals forconstruction in rapidly developing and industrializing Italy. Among these areseveral texts by Giuseppe Ciribini, G. Mario Oliveri, Piero Spadolini and otherswho furthered the rapid spread of modular construction in Italy throughthe late 1970s. The emphasis in these later works discussed the issue ofprefabrication at a theoretical level as a “system” and orchestration of thevarious parts that have a logic in their combination, which provides an interestingcontext to examine contemporary research and the proliferation ofparametric modeling and BIM systems of integration and fabrication.This paper asserts that a historical study provides a critical lens with whichto analyze contemporary research, and that they were important steps at thetime and are relevant to research today.History Session III

Volume Editors
John Quale, Rashida Ng & Ryan E. Smith

ISBN
978-0-935502-85-5